A blog is a powerful marketing tool for any growing business. If you plan to set up a blog for your online personal training services, you will need to focus on marketing your fitness business just as much as providing outstanding personal training service for your clients.
In today's article, we'll focus on a long-term marketing strategy that is important for every online fitness business that wants to rank on Google and for local personal trainers who want to build an audience online.
A blog on your fitness website can massively improve the site's visibility online, attract more of your ideal clients and become a super-efficient tool in generating leads. This way, you can ensure that your business can grow as fast as you would hope. It can also be a place where you provide helpful and unique information to your clients, thereby helping to improve the service you are offering.
Here are the five steps you can take to start your fitness blog, whether you're a complete beginner or a seasoned blogger.
Step 1. Get To Know Your Target Audience
In general, you need to get as close as possible to a solid understanding of your target audience for creating a successful online marketing strategy. Only by knowing as much as you can about the people who are likely to be your audience can you effectively and adequately tailor your fitness blog to be as effective as possible in attracting the right followers.When it comes to blogging, you can take some specific steps to get to know your target audience. If you're a newbie personal trainer, the best place you can start is your social circle. See who'd be up for fitness consultation and then find out more about their struggles regarding fitness, nutrition and health. You can go as far as offering a taster session to see them in action then ask them what they thought about it.
More experienced trainers and coaches have the luxury to reach out to their current and previous clients and find out as much relevant information about their goals, life and fitness challenges as they can.
The more you understand who your ideal clients are, the more you will know your target audience. Then all you need to do is nail down a few details of their life to create an avatar. That will be the person your blogs will want to address and attract. What aspects of your audience's life might be relevant? Here are a few details:
- age
- gender
- relationship status
- whether or not they have kids
- what their most significant fitness and the health-related challenge is
- what they've tried to solve that problem in the past
- why they failed
- what they think they NEED to solve it finally
Remember, this might change over time, so don't try to get it perfect. Just have some ideas on who you want to talk to.
Step 2. Find Your Voice
In some way, you need to distinguish yourself from all the other fitness blogs out there - and there are a lot of them! You can do this with the content you choose to write, but probably only up to a point. A much better way to stand out is to find your voice, which is partly about the branding of your personal training business and partly about your writing style.In general, finding your voice in your writing can only be done one way: by doing more writing. The more articles you write for your blog, the more you'll hone in on the style that works for you, which sets you apart from the crowd.
But if you want to speed up that process, you might also want to take inspiration from other fitness blogs. Bear in mind that this means looking at what you think they are doing right and what you think they could improve. Understanding your own opinion will ensure that you are getting closer to working out your voice.
Just remember, getting inspired by others in the industry is a great way to get your own creative juices flowing, but only you can be you. You don't need to create a writing persona that differs from how you chat to your clients in session or interact on social media. Just ensure you're honest and genuine but also professional in everything you write.
Step 3. Find Topics Your Ideal Clients Want To Hear About
This is when mastering step 1. will be very helpful. Even if you're a newbie personal trainer, you will have a vague idea of the problems that will interest your potential clients; Weight loss, exercise tips for getting lean, how to eat for weight loss and so on. However, to grab the attention of a more specific audience, you might want to be more specific in the fitness topics. Here's a few ideas on how to find topic ideas:Ask Your Clients and Audience
If you've been in the industry for some time, you can always ask the people around you that will benefit from your articles the most. Your old clients, current clients, email subscribers and social media audience will thank you for addressing issues they tell you they want to learn more about, and those will be the topics that others will look for as well.
Check Out Public Forums and Social Media Groups
This may take up a little more of your time to research, but it will be worth it. Whether it's a group on Facebook or Instagram, a forum on Reddit or Quora, you'll be able to find plenty of ideas there and some answers other professionals already gave.
Use AnswerThe Public to find commonly asked questions
Answer the Public is a geeky search listening tool where you can submit a topic like "fitness" or "weight loss" or "bodybuilding" and get a range of topics and questions back from search engines. Pretty cool, ha!
Once you have a good number of topics, you are going to be in a position to start thinking about filling up your blog with interesting and informative articles.
Step 4. Research The Topics To Back Your Claims
Competency is an essential cornerstone in fitness writing. You don't just want to tell your clients any old thing in the hope that they will keep on reading your blog. No: you should aim to deliver accurate, helpful information to take away and apply to their own lives. To do that, you need to spend some time researching each topic before you write about it.Even if you think you already know everything there is to know on the subject - think again! Chances are, you can learn more - and then pass on that knowledge to others.
Good research also helps your SEO, especially if you are linking back to reputable sources. So, researching any specific topic might look like a lot more time spent on each blog. In reality, that time will be an excellent investment to create something of value that will have multiple benefits:
- providing evidence-based value-packed content for your clients and audience
- boosting your articles SEO ranking by linking to high authority websites
- learning new things you can apply in your fitness coaching, thus improving your clients' results
Step 5. Write Your Fitness Articles
Finally, you need to put all that together and start writing your articles. It would be best if you aimed to write a few, to begin with, but only publish one at a time, at a rate of about one or two a week at most. That way, you can constantly keep some articles back waiting to be published while you provide the blog with a steady stream of articles - but one that is not too quick. Remember when you write to edit, polish and perfect before you press that publish button.The ideal length for a blog depends on the goal of the article. In any case, you'd like to ensure that you get the message across in as few words as you can while providing the most outstanding value. This doesn't mean your articles should be short. In some instances, quite the opposite. It means that you want to ensure there isn't much fluff and redundancy and all the sentences you write have a reason to be in the article.
So, in terms of article length, there are a few ways to decide how long it should be:
- Quick and informative tips - 500+ words
- A little more in-depth article on a complex topic - 750-1000 words
- Articles explicitly written for boosting SEO ranking - 1500+ words, and these need to be keyword optimized.
